A cynical game of treachery and deceit

At a crucial moment in the coalition negotiations, David Cameron won over sceptical Tory MPs by entrusting them with a deeply significant revelation.

Cameron divulged that Gordon Brown was intent on offering the Liberal Democrats the guarantee of electoral reform in return for a Lib/Lab pact.

As further evidence of his commitment, Gordon Brown was offering them electoral reform without even the need for a referendum.

Tactical union: David Cameron swayed sceptical Tories by revealing Gordon brown's plans to concede electoral reform as the price of a Lib-Lab pact

Cameron's revelation was decisive.

It convinced scores of Tory MPs that there was no point in holding out against a Tory-Lib Dem coalition - even though the price of such a coalition was a promise to hold a referendum on the so-called 'alternative vote' system which will cost numerous Tory MPs their seats.

Backbench Tories reasonably concluded that if Labour was set on introducing the alternative vote in any case, it was far better if the Tories carry it out on their own terms.

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We now know, thanks to Peter Mandelson, that those MPs were cruelly deceived. The crucial revelation from the first instalment of Peter Mandelson's memoir, published yesterday, is that Labour never made any such promise to the Lib Dems.

The Mandelson memoir reveals only that Danny Alexander, the chief Lib Dem negotiator, did indeed ask for such a commitment.

But Mandelson's response seems to have been at best non-committal. As Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has since confirmed to the House of Commons, there was no guarantee of electoral reform from New Labour.

So Tory back-benchers are entitled to feel betrayed, angry and abused. What is rather less certain, however, is whether David Cameron himself was guilty of bad faith.

We cannot say for certain that Cameron was deliberately and cynically lying to his back-benchers in order to persuade them to throw their weight behind the coalition.

It may well be that Cameron himself was being conned by Nick Clegg, who was telling fibs to the Conservatives in order to force them to raise the stakes at a vital moment in the negotiations.

It is utterly impossible to say who is lying in this cynical and treacherous poker game, and who is telling the truth.

We can say one thing for certain, however. This kind of trickery and deceit will become par for the course if Nick Clegg gets his way and secures the Alternative Vote.

For the AV system would hugely raise the number of Liberal Democrat MPs, and therefore vastly increase the likelihood of a hung parliament.

Indeed, this kind of haggling - which seemed extraordinary and abnormal at the time - will become standard practice. Single party government - the method used to govern Britain over most of the last 50 years - will suddenly seem odd and abnormal.

Under AV, governments will cease to be decided by the democratic vote of the British people - but by secret deals struck behind the scenes between members of the Westminster political elite.

This is an environment in which sinuous and untrustworthy figures like Peter Mandelson thrive.

But it is a world where the honest British voter gets a rotten deal.

One of the most intriguing disclosures in the Mandelson book so far is the story of how Gordon Brown, trying desperately to hang on to power, arranged a secret meeting with Nick Clegg.

In order not to be spotted, Brown, accompanied by Mandelson, walked along the underground passage that links 10 Downing Street to the Ministry of Defence, and from there made his way unobserved to a meeting in the House of Commons office with the Liberal Democrat leader.

This kind of furtive procedure is utterly alien to open and transparent government. But it is a normal course of action where no one party holds a majority. Such a situation forces political parties into secret deals and, worst still, betrayal.

Let's consider the coalition agreement which was unveiled by David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Downing Street Rose Garden in May.

Had anybody voted for this agreement? No. Had anybody voted for the coalition government? No. Indeed, the coalition agreement systematically and quite deliberately repudiated many of the most important pledges made in the Liberal Democrat and Tory Party manifestos.

The Liberals, for instance, had angrily opposed early spending cuts, warning that such action risked plunging Britain back into recession.

Meanwhile the Conservatives tore up their manifesto promise to slash inheritance tax. The pledge to repatriate powers from Europe was ditched. Suddenly Tory voters were confronted with a vote on electoral reform.

Some of these sudden policy lurches may have been sensible, some of them disastrous. But none of them were even remotely democratic.

This is political life designed to fit a narrow, professional political class - and exclude everyone else. It is utter heaven for the Mandelsons of this world.

One of the reasons why Mandelson admires the European Union so much is that this is how politicians conduct themselves there.

The widespread use of proportional representation means single party rule is very much the exception there - and government is a matter very much for a tiny elite, with politicians from rival parties having far more in common with each other than they ever do with voters.

This lack of any real accountability is one of the reasons why much of European politics is so catastrophically corrupt.

Sadly, Britain is heading in this direction very fast indeed, and any move towards the Alternative Vote will push us there even faster.

To be fair, it is important to acknowledge that the 'First Past The Post' voting system which has been in use in Britain for hundreds of years is also deeply flawed.

It means that hundreds of constituencies are effectively pocket boroughs where individual voters count for nothing - the fate of Tories across Scotland and many Labour supporters in south-east England - meaning party machines have adopted the malign practice of devoting their attention to a handful of swing voters, thus effectively disenfranchising tens of millions of people.

One consequence of this debased system is that in 2005 Tony Blair was returned as prime minister with the support of barely more than one quarter of the adult British population.

But the Alternative Vote system is in some respects even less democratic. Judging by the evidence we have to date, its consequences are equally malign.

It enables politicians to break their promises, opening the way to secrecy and deceit. Under these circumstances, even a leader as fundamentally honest as David Cameron can find himself deceiving his core voters on vital change to the British Constit ution.